The author of the hyperblog:
Gennadi Bedjanian of Vancouver, BC, Canada.
I grew up with the Internet so hypertext is where I naturally occur. I even saw physical hypertext in Tokyo. More details are probably irrelevant here. I'm not even putting my distracting face on this page.
This is all about Hypertext.
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Example of hypertext in context
Let's take the headquarters of a fictitious company as an example.
Pic. A represents a real-world headquarters building with offices, elevators, services, employees, formal and informal relationships, everything. The amount of information there is infinitely large.
Pic. B represents a description of the headquarters. It may be a one page summary, a website, filing cabinets with blueprints, personnel files, an archive, or something else of the sort.
Pic. C represents a person's knowledge about the headquarters.
No person can know everything about the headquarters, so C has less information than A.
We are interested in B mostly, because texts and hypertexts are descriptions. No description can explicitly give every detail about a simplest object. Descriptions only provide relevant information for particular viewpoints in particular situations. The rest is presumed known. That's why the picture is hazy.
For instance, a document may describe how to troubleshoot a copier in the headquarters, but the amount of background information a person must know before using the meagre few pages of the document is incomparable with the few kilobytes of the description. Clearly, B has the least information.
Even so, the amount of information in B is almost certain to exceed human ability to take it in directly. It's likely to be not a short note, but rather a depositary with both paper documents and machine-readable media. The more data is accumulated in B, the more reason it is to organize it into hypertext.
The degree of hypertextualization depends on how much of the system is in electronic form. For instance, an information center may have a catalog, databases, and major periodicals in electronic format, and the bulk of its reference sources, books, and documents in hardcopy. Or it may have everything digitalized, searchable, and accessible via the Web.
Sounds better, but that's just the beginning of hypertext, because hardware progress from a flat medium, such as an Oriental rug carrying a cosmogonic myth, to a multidimensional medium, such as DVD, is only creating the potential. We should be able to use these unprecedented amounts of information with more ease and pleasure than we used books. A good interface is needed.
As a result, B splits into two parts: (a) stored data, and (b) interface providing access to the data. BTW, either is likely to be a hypertext.